Taken from a 1961 radio broadcast, this famous performance, long familiar on the bootleg circuit, finally gets a commercial release as part of Orfeo’s series devoted to the Bayreuth festival’s archives.

It’s not perfect. Editorially it’s wayward, presenting us with a cut version of the 1845 Dresden score, into which the Venusberg music from the 1861 Paris revision has been inserted. Wolfgang Windgassen’s intensity in the title role, meanwhile, sometimes comes at the price of vocal unwieldiness. On the plus side, however, are Victoria de los Angeles’s supremely touching Elisabeth, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s tragic, lovelorn Wolfram, and the glorious Venus, among the finest on disc, of Grace Bumbry.

Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch admirably negotiates the work’s at times deliberately blurred dividing line between spiritual and sexual experience, though he’s not as extreme as some interpreters – ironic given that the Wieland Wagner production from which this was taken was deemed pornographic at the time. The mono sound is warm and crystal clear.